graham

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Making stuff to distract myself from existential dread

Art: @graham-illustrations
Dreams: @graham-dream-journal
Wizards: @make-up-a-wizard
Partner's Pottery: @kp-pottery

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in reply to @graham's post:

My feeling has always been that the set of simple machines is already kind of arbitrary.

The screw is an inclined plane wrapped into a helix. The wedge is an inclined plane being operated in reverse. The pulley is a wheel and axle, it's just being used differently - if we're including how you use these (a rope around a wheel instead of a wheel rolling over a surface) then I feel like we could go nuts.

"The claw side of a framing hammer" seems incredibly simple and it doesn't feel like you can quite simplify it into any of these - but really, it's probably just a lever with an unusual fulcrum, right? Yet it doesn't feel like you can just call it that, unless we're going to agree that a screw is distinct from an inclined plane. At which point we get into debates of where the line is - maybe the different classes of lever should be considered distinct machines, since they work so differently.

In my heart, I'm not even certain that the lever and wedge are different machines.

If I wanted to get spicy, I would add Bowden cables (though they're really just "what if you surrounded something with a circular inclined plane), venturis and hydraulic+pneumatic lines and pistons (although that's getting into fluid dynamics, which is a whole other can of worms.)

Oh yeah, the "classical simple machines" are completely arbitrary!

I love that inclined plane is just a wedge at rest, for example

I feel like screws make up a bunch of what I know about fluid dynamics (propellers, for instance)

Is a wing a simple machine?

A piston-crankshaft-drivewheel situation. I don't know if there's a good single word for that. Basically, the thing that converts rotary motion into reciprocal motion and back.

Cogs.

Triangles. They take motion and say "no thanks".